With nearly 3,500 F-35s still scheduled for production during the life of the Joint Strike Fighter program, it is imperative to look at every aspect of the manufacturing process to reduce costs while ensuring a high level of quality. That is exactly why a team from Lockheed Martin Aeronautics, the Enterprise Drilling Center of Excellence […]

A lot of machining plants use custom cutting tools, although the amount varies. For some, it’s standard; for most, it’s occasional, even rare. The question is: When should a machining operation consider custom over standard tools? Here, Andrew Gilpin, business development manager of cutting tool manufacturer AMAMCO Tool, in Greer, S.C., discusses the factors that […]

Manufacture of the stealthy Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II has two important precision machining activities: (1) edge routing of the wing skins and forward fuselage panels and (2) drilling of holes in the machined parts to assemble the wings and forward fuselage. All external structural surfaces are made of carbon-epoxy (one of many CFRPs) with […]

Machine Tools Process Change Nets 450 Percent More Holes Drilled Per Bit Life Cycle When faced with a tooling change, testing at Lockheed revealed that precise cutting edge geometries allowed operators to greatly reduce span time and increased feed rates. The resulting tool and process change netted a 450 percent increase in the number of […]